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| The Paintings of Robert Dawson at the Goldmark Gallery |
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by Rigby Graham
(06 Feb 2004) |
Towards the end of 1999 Mike Goldmark passed me a small plastic bag which contained a battered collection of pink, green and grey sheets of sugar paper on which had been mounted fifty colour snapshots of paintings. Another dozen or so were loosely inserted. Goldmark had often handed me folders, envelopes, plastic wallets and bundles of photographs and slides of work which had been sent to him. My heart always sank. The amount of this kind of material which is churned out can be utterly depressing, and having looked at this sort of thing for the last forty-five years I have tried unsuccessfully to make it plain to him that I can really take no more. Courtesy rather than keenness caused me to look as carefully as I could at these hazy snaps and I was surprised by some of what I saw.
The photographs were of oil paintings by Robert Dawson, and Goldmark was anxious to know whether there was enough material in a reasonable state of completion which might form the basis of a small retrospective show in his gallery at Uppingham. Would I care to accompany him to what had been Dawson's home in West Bridgford to see what we could and to see whether I could draft a few notes by way of introduction to an exhibition were that to prove a wise and practicable decision? Dawson had died two years earlier and although Goldmark had met him at the gallery on two, perhaps three occasions, he had no idea that the man painted. Dawson had mentioned that he was a musician and played the alto-saxophone.
We were surprised by what we saw. The workrooms and the house were crammed with paintings. Dawson was born in 1926 the son of a postman who took the young lad in his post van to deliver letters to farms in the Staffordshire moorlands and this was an early influence on the impressionable boy. He attended Leek High School which he left at the age of seventeen. He was offered a scholarship to Stoke-on-Trent College of Art but did not take it up. His mother apparently refused to let him go to Stoke because 'she feared he would be sick on the bus'. We do not know exactly what the home circumstances may have been, and there might easily have been other factors which contributed to this bizarre decision. However, the result was of critical importance in the light of his subsequent development, and is evidenced in the close range of the work produced many years later.
During the '40s and '50s art schools in the English Midlands were lively and exciting places. For any young person who was sensitive, intelligent and imaginative the opportunities for getting a good grounding in the practice of art and design and crafts were considerable. Not only were staff required to be practising artists, craftsmen and designers but art students themselves were invariably a lively bunch and the excitement and friendly rivalry generated acted as a stimulus or spur. The standards which could be achieved in life and costume studies, in perspective, anatomy, and architectural drawing were often very high. The emphasis was upon a sound knowledge and understanding of drawing and it was this which underpinned most of what went on in art schools. The old two year Ministry of Education Drawing Examination, later the Intermediate Examination in Art and Craft, was followed by a further two years study for the National Diploma in Design in a specialist subject, such as painting. A teaching year followed, again with considerable opportunity for further study in two or three other art or craft subject areas. This meant that in the majority of cases, students had a wide range of specific subjects taught on a practical basis by specialists who were themselves artists, and others who came from industrial trades and who taught particular techniques and skills. Terms were long as were the hours. A student attended five and a half days a week with the addition of four evenings for life drawing or trade classes for practical craft-work, often geared towards City and Guilds examinations. If a student did five years full-time, frequently after a year or two of part-time study, he or she would have acquired considerable practical knowledge, skill and understanding, very difficult to come by in any other way. Sadly for Dawson, being cut off from experiencing those important art college foundations, when students are most receptive to influence and example, and when young artists were enjoying shared enthusiasms and the stimulating conditions prevalent at so many art schools at this formative period, left a void in his life. He filled this in part and as best he could with the exciting world of music which he found rewarding, and he visited exhibitions and drew and painted whenever opportunities arose. That he took a different path shows in his work.
He started work in a solicitor's office and his duties included the writing-out of legal documents. As a schoolboy he had wanted to be a poet, a musician and a painter. At the age of twenty-two he decided to try to become a professional musician. He played the alto-saxophone in a dance band, and it was here that he met and married Peggy, a singer in the band. He became successful and at this time, the 'Big Band' era, he played on tours of United States Army Air Force bases in Germany. He was not called up for National Service, being rejected on medical grounds. In 1965 he took an 'A' level course in English and Art at Clarendon College, Nottingham. This enabled him in 1966 to undertake a two year teacher training course at the Sidney Webb College, London as a mature student, to become a primary school teacher. He taught for three years at Addison Junior School in London and then from 1971 until his retirement twenty years later, at Trent Bridge Junior School, Nottingham.
Those long years of teaching until his retirement at sixty five gave Dawson a regular salary and, according to his wife, long vacations which enabled them to take extended self-catering holidays when he could visit and paint those places he most enjoyed, among them the north Midlands and especially Wales. In those few years after his retirement from teaching, he was able to devote more time to painting. Most of his work was painted at home in his studio, for some of it was quite large. He worked from pencil and ink sketches made outside and from transparencies, for which he used a viewer and sometimes projected onto a screen. He also worked occasionally from colour prints. In his studio he had boxes of slides, and many photographs which he had taken with his Canon Megazoom 105.
Dawson exhibited in a variety of mixed exhibitions and a few one-man shows. Unfortunately there were no catalogues of any substance which I have been able to find so therefore information in this direction is incomplete. However, he did exhibit at the following, some details of which Peggy Dawson has kindly supplied -:
The Thackeray Gallery, London 1971
Focus Gallery, Nottingham 1975
Handmade, Calver, Derbyshire 1976
England's Gallery, Leek, Staffordshire
The Weaver Gallery, Weaverham, Cheshire 1976
Menai Bridge Gallery, Anglesey 1989
The White Room Gallery, Harlech 1994
Peaches Gallery, Cropwell Butler, Nottinghamshire 1996
He also exhibited at the Kingsway Gallery, Kirkby-in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, Gallery 359, Nottingham and at the Royal Cambrian Academy (for entries of his pictures appear in several of their annual lists of exhibited work). In 1973 he won the Holbrook Prize at Nottingham Castle Museum, when Richard Eurich headed the selection committee, and again in 1974 when Edward Bawden was the chairman. His work was also shown as a member of the Society of Staffordshire Artists.
When Dawson died his studio and workrooms were stacked out with paintings, many of them unfinished, untitled and undated. They were a mixed bag but the best of them were impressive in their scale, their vigour and the involvement with the landscape subjects he chose to depict. He had plenty of books, an impressive collection of modern pottery and ceramic figures, his music and a collection of paintings which he had bought from different sources over a long period. This homely setting, combined with all his own paintings, gave me something of the measure of the man. His books, of which there were several cases full, were those of a reader rather than a collector. They were well used and it would seem for enjoyment, information and research as well as for stimulus. There were books of poetry, biography and music and a good range of volumes dealing with many aspects of British art and artists. There were also a surprising number of 'How to do it' books, which might indicate Dawson's need to fill that gap in training denied by those circumstances under which he had grown up.
The house was full of paintings, not only of Dawson's but many from others whose work he admired. There were oils by Welsh and English artists, some local, some better known. There were paintings by Barbara Stewart, Kyffin Williams, John Farrington, Edward Bawden, Claudia Williams and a fine harvest painting by H Gaster, bought from Gaster's wife after the artist's death. There were several by Arthur Prichard and one by his brother Gwilym of whom Robert Meyrick wrote 'human presence is seldom represented directly but has left its mark - stone walls, clusters of white-washed farm buildings, telegraph poles and slate fences. The paintings are more than a response to the experience of landscape or feelings evoked by the place, they are a celebration of the media itself; Prichard has learnt to appreciate and exploit the accidental, to manipulate the paint surface and tease out the subject that is in his mind.' Meyrick's analysis of Prichard's way of exploiting the accidental might just as easily and as appropriately have been written by him of Dawson's painting.
In Dawson's hall there were two magnificent oils of cottages and views of Wales by John Elwyn. These had a luminous jewel-like quality and Elwyn was a painter with whose work Dawson was very familiar and who was an influence upon him. Both loved Wales - Elwyn was Welsh by birth, Dawson by adoption. John Elwyn's subject matter was wide and diverse, and most of his paintings contained many figures, at work, at church and at social gatherings. His paintings were full of people, chickens, cattle, children, goats, and in all these respects as well as his technique and treatment, differed widely from Dawson's. What their work had in common however was a quiet intensity and a love of landscape, especially that of Wales, characteristics which they share.
He was influenced also by the works of Sheila Fell, Josef Herman and Joan Eardley, and made a point when he could of visiting places where some of these artists he admired had painted. Eardley was one of those whose work he very much admired and he and his wife went to the fishing village of Catterline near Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire to see the Watch House where Joan Eardley had lived and worked. Peggy told me how much this visit had meant to him, how he was excited by it. This is understandable for there are affinities between what he was trying to do in his painting with some of Joan Eardley's work. There are paintings of Dawson's - Farm in Wales (no.15), Hill Farms at Cesarea (no.10) and Grazing Cattle (no.6) which show some of the similarities with the way in which Joan Eardley worked. In The Unquiet Landscape, Places and Ideas in Twentieth Century English Painting Faber and Faber, 1990 Christopher Neve, writing of the way in which Joan Eardley painted said '…she drew and re-drew the swaying of the summer landscape as though sunk in its motion, sometimes staring like an insect directly into the red of a late sun at harvest. The results are not romantic pictures of ripe high summer landscapes; they are hard fought, near-abstract paintings which depend on a struggle of sensibilities in paint…'. What Neve says of Eardley might just as easily be applied to some of Dawson's work exhibited here.
There were many other landscape painters who chose to work in Wales with whom Dawson's approach to the subject has marked similarities. In the Glyn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, for example, there is an oil Llanthony Valley, done about 1948 by George Meyer Marten (1897-1960), which is of a dark landscape under a dark sky, which lightens at the horizon to emphasise by tone rather than by colour, the dramatic in such passing effects of light and darkness. It is an age-old method of heightening the drama and it works in Marten's case as it does in some of Dawson's exhibited here. When overdone or used too frequently there is a risk of it becoming a visual cliché and a danger of appearing theatrical, even histrionic. Dawson mostly manages to avoid this, showing good judgment, and the fact that he does so is an example of his having benefited from his long preference for, and specialising in, a closely related range of landscape subject matter.
Many of Dawson's landscapes have an oppressive weight, an inherent stillness, partly reminiscent of Josef Herman or of some of those unpeopled and empty landscapes of L. S. Lowry. Dawson's way of working was similar to that of Lowry, the results were very different. It was sometimes that the approach was the same. Michael Howard points out in his recent volume Lowry, a Visionary Artist The Lowry Press, Salford Quays, 2000, how progress was alien to Lowry. He describes him as an obsessive and compulsive artist who worked on a few chosen themes with a single minded intensity throughout his career. He writes of Lowry 'his working habits were such that he was just as likely in later years to paint a scene recalling an earlier painting style as he was to work within some more expected vein of expression. He was extremely vague about dating many of his paintings…'. This could apply just as readily to Dawson, as so many of the examples left in his studio testify.
The influence of Kyffin Williams was particularly strong at certain periods in Dawson's life. He admired Williams, knew him and owned work by him. At different times Dawson's use of heavily facetted impasto was very dominant indeed. He emulated Williams' vigorous way of working and also at times the dark range of greys, blacks and particularly browns showed signs of changing from habit to obsession. Some of those paintings in which brown predominates are sombre and have a stillness about them The Buxton Road (no.28), Winter in Wales (no.26). This tendency towards brown can be a worrying indicator particularly in the painting of landscape. Brown rarely appears in the natural tone order of things. People invariably quote the one or two exceptions, generalised rather than specific, of ploughed fields or bracken-covered moors. Brown in its many manifestations in paint, but not in nature, is without brightness and almost devoid of chroma. Sadly it made a considerable contribution to muddying the traditions of much nineteenth century painting, and was one of the things which Parkes Bonington, Constable and Turner rebelled against. It was also one of the reasons why their work became such a forceful influence on the continent and particularly in France. Unfortunately, insidious brown landscapes are still with us. Traces of them are present in amateur Art Society exhibitions throughout the kingdom.
In spite of all the different movements and changes which have happened - the fashionably reported, the avant-garde and the lunatic - most have contributed something of lasting value which has influenced visual thinking in often very different ways. Without such regular infusions what is often loosely referred to as traditional painting would be dead indeed, deader than the dodo. In any work some influences are easily recognised, and in representational, figurative, traditional or whatever adjective the viewer is easiest with, what has been influential is even more readily apparent, and usually adds to our responses of enjoyment and understanding, for we react most amicably and sympathetically to the known and the familiar. It is against this reaction that we are the more readily persuaded visually to accept the new, the strange and the alien, whether in treatment or imagery and where inseparable, both.
The traditional in English landscape has affected and has influenced us all. It affected Dawson more than many. Living in those years he did he saw, as we all could have done, the English countryside as an image of a place with a secure and loved national identity. Artists had played a significant part in helping us all to understand something of our own cultural and national identity. With growing threats from happenings in Europe, and all the uncertainty and fear engendered in the press and on the wireless, we came to need and to remember the countryside and its life as an inaccurate pastoral idyll - country churches, thatched cottages, lakeland, the seaside, abbeys and cathedrals, fine houses, pleasant country towns, mountains, downland, 'fields of barley and of rye'. The countryside was sought and promoted. The cycle, the bus, the local train and the charabanc made so much so accessible to so many. The countryside was publicised - Dawson had been introduced to this in his father's red postal van. He later saw evidence of this in the numerous magazines, county guides and other publications and promotions by Shell and others. He saw the Batsford books, the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and he knew the photographs of Edwin Smith and Margaret Harker. Those traditions, upon which Dawson's development fed, were of the landscape as it was presented to us in books, photographs and in time-honoured imagery, whether in magazines, on calendars or in railway carriages, and the continuing traditions of painting to which all art students are exposed and through which they learn and develop as they add from their own experience. In Dawson's case he worked the harder to make up that early large gap caused by incomprehensible circumstance which was hinted at earlier.
All those paintings of Dawson's which I have seen conform in dealing with a range of subjects which he took up again and again throughout his painting life. In this, as with Lowry referred to earlier, he continued unhindered by a need for progression. His repetitious reworking of closely related themes - groups of cottages, a few farm buildings, a road leading to a Welsh homestead - recalls Freud's notions of what is described as 'repetition compulsion', a term describing a practice 'which allows a constant revisiting, for healing and rehealing'. Most artists working in isolation, absolute or comparative, would admit that they are involved in repeated acts of painting as in other patterns of behaviour, which are attempts, doomed to failure, to resolve something which could not be resolved in any other way. The compositions in Dawson's paintings are like repeated symbols, motifs made up of small units rather than a single one. There are sections of stone walls, gateways, gable ends and chimney stacks, rounded tussocks and small hills. They signify remote or isolated communities, but also symbolise something of Dawson's own isolated position. Repetition, readjustment and closely related changes in arrangement, colour and key were as important to him in his painting as they probably were in his music.
Dawson's landscapes stand apart from many of his contemporaries who painted the changing face of the land and all the activity contained therein. Keith Vaughan, Graham Sutherland, Edward Bawden, John Aldridge, Paul Nash and so many others painted a great deal of what was going on in the landscape. Dawson painted what hadgone on as far as man was concerned. There are figures seen very occasionally in his work, St. Cybi Church, Holyhead (no.3), and as passers-by rather than engaged in working. There is no sign of hedging, ditching, milking, harvesting, repairs to building or drainage, no sign of roadworks, no cars or lorries. There are no aircraft passing, no birds nor much evidence of children, cats or dogs. There is little evidence either of farm vehicles - agricultural machinery, combine harvesters, side-delivery rakes, drills, ploughs, or harrows. There is no sign of tools and equipment which might indicate or suggest incidental activity which would underscore a working landscape. There are a few cows, but nothing much in the way of horses, goats or pigs. All these things formed part of that visual vocabulary common to so many painters who were working at the same time as Dawson, and with whose work he was obviously familiar from the many books in his studio.
In some of Dawson's landscapes, Iddesleigh, North Devon (no.9), and Welsh Farmstead (no.7), the treatment of skies echoes the feeling of some of Paul Henry's paintings of massing cumulus over a cluster of steep-pitched cottages. Henry's paintings were widely reproduced over a long period and were much loved. In an introduction to Henry's autobiography An Irish Portrait Batsford 1951, Sean O'Faolin writes of how much he delighted in Henry's sure observation of nature, and how people say 'that he is always painting the same thing - clouds, blue mountains and black bogs', and goes on to agree with this premise '…he is always indeed, painting the same thing; always the one thing - light caught in a flux, a moment's dazzling miracle. His pictures are amazingly mobile with this miracle of light…He never repeats himself.'. So there is another side to the coin, and justification, were such ever needed, for Dawson's close range of subject matter in which he chose to express himself, Welsh Farmstead (no.7).
He specialised in landscapes which seemed deserted or where movement was muted and activity slow. There was a sense of quiet and stillness and the spectator must read from the textures on stone walls and white-washed buildings hints of what might have been happening in the recent past. The rutted tracks in Iddesleigh, North Devon (no.9) lead the viewer into these places where little stirs or moves. There are rough roads and narrow pathways which lead in other paintings to other places. Most of these have a sense of sadness and dereliction. There is drama suggested in village buildings against a skyline - Leek Road, Biddulph Moor (no.20), Backs, Deiniolen (no.30); drama too in Hill Farms at Cesarea (no.10), where sunlight falls on the orange rust and on the blue paint of a corrugated shed next to a white-washed cottage. Generally though these are quiet landscapes suggesting picturesque decay, which the white painted cottages of Dark Sky over Wales (no.5) and Red Sky (no.27) only serve to emphasise. Time is passing in these fragmented dwellings, it is also passing them by.
Rigby Graham. |
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